The BAE 146: A Life

Northwest Avro RJ (a BAE 146 variant) at the Minneapolis-St. Paul Airport, 2004

In her new novel Contents May Have Shifted, Pam Houston starts off one of the in-flight inter-chapters (a descent into the Kingdom of Bhutan) by describing the British Aerospace "146-100 STOL Regionals, jets famous for their tight turns and short landing and takeoff specs" (78).

This isn't the only thing the BAE 146 is known for. It's also known (to many "rampers," anyway) for having a really tricky exterior lavatory dumping mechanism: the embedded valve on the outside of the plane where you have to hook up a big black hose in order to evacuate the urine and feces collected over thousands of airborne miles.

I remember when I was trained to operate this type of valve: it was under the runway lights on the tarmac one summer night when our SkyWest aircraft were suddenly replaced by Air Wisconsin's jets—Air Wisconsin is another regional carrier for United Airlines. Air Wisconsin flew the BAE 146 planes at that time, and learning to park, clean, and prepare these unfamiliar jets for flight was like learning a new language. And the lavatory dump valve was like the subjunctive: full of its own nuances and hidden possibilities.

The lavatory cart is basically an enclosed reservoir of human waste on wheels; look out your window seat and you'll recognize it as a low-profile, squarish trailer with a big black tube like a snake coiled or curled kinkily around the top. At my airport, once a week a septic pump truck (like the kind typically seen at campgrounds and servicing Port-a-Jons) would drive onto the tarmac and empty the cart. We would use the cart every evening (and sometimes between flights during the day) to empty out the toilets on the planes—when the crew would call in from fifteen minutes out, they might say they needed "lav service," which meant that it was time to haul out the lav cart and do our duty.

Needless to say, it was not the preferred job among airline ramp workers. Despite the powerful aroma-cancelling power of so-called "blue juice" (the admixture of chemicals inserted into the toilet to counteract the smell of waste), one might still encounter random spurts and sprays, or errant turds, while servicing the lav.

The lav cart has a six-inch diameter hose that hooks up to the side of the plane, and then there is a release lever on the plane that lets all the blue fecal matter and blue urine to travel down a loop-d-loop path into the reservoir. On the newer Canadair Regional Jets, this is a fairly neat and tidy task: the release lever is just to the side of valve. When you're done, the valve simply flaps back and seals in place, and the separation of plane, poop, and person seems clear and distinct.

On the BAE 146, however, the release for the toilet chamber is actually located inside the valve itself, and basically you have to hook up the hose and then manipulate a spring-loaded interior rod to disengage the valve and get things flowing. At the end of the dump, you have to twist and push the rod just so to reinsert and seal the valve (which you cannot see, but must feel via the rod).

One of the first times I did this, after I finished shaking the loose ends of blue toilet paper wads and dangling fecal matter into into the reservoir on the lav cart, I looked up at the side of the plane and realized that the valve was missing: I was staring up into the underside abyss of the airplane toilet. I had not correctly reinserted the valve. I glanced in the hose—nothing. I looked around on the tarmac frantically, but to no avail. It was in the lav cart, somewhere in a foot-deep pool of shit, piss, and blue juice that had been stewing for a week—the septic truck was due to the airport the next day.

Luckily, the accoutrements for this part of the job included gauntlet-style thick rubber gloves, and so I simply reached in, probed around with my fingers, swishing this way and that, around unknown clumps and viscera, until I found the metal valve. I fished it out, shook it off, and reinserted it in the side of the plane.

It was, for all intents and purposes, a close call. That plane could have been grounded for days—who knows where a replacement valve would have been located, and how long it would have taken for the airline to ship it up to Bozeman, Montana using the inter-airline mail system? I remember that my co-worker (who was busy dealing with lost baggage claims while I had started to clean the aircraft) nearly gagged when I described what had happened. For myself, I was more than a little thrilled by the whole experience. I had put my hand in that taboo nether region, that most abject place, where shit is collected and dealt with as if covertly, beyond the view of thriving, bustling progress. I feel like I really know the BAE 146, in a special way.

The BAE 146 is also the plane that happens to appear in the background on the cover of my book:


The BAE 146 is no longer in commercial service in the U.S., and yet my own encounters with this aircraft continue to occur: in literature, in images, and in lingering memories like this one.

Brad Pitt at the Airport

So Brad Pitt didn't win an Oscar. It's really not that surprising, after all. As my friend Robert Bennett has speculated, Pitt is considered at turns too popular or too artsy to be viable Oscar material. Which is really a shame, because he should have won easily for Best Actor; in his big roles this year, in The Tree of Life and in Moneyball, he gave brilliant and nuanced performances.

And, for my own particular interests, both of these films involved key scenes of Brad Pitt at the airport. In the shot above, for instance, the reason Pitt is holding his hand to his ear while talking on the phone is because he's in an airfield office, and there's a deafening airplane idling on the tarmac right outside. If airports often stand for human progress, Pitt's defeated character struggling to communicate at the airfield is one of the most pointed and powerfully suggested critiques of human hubris in the film.

For more on Brad Pitt at the airport, you can read my guest author post on the Continuum Literary Studies blog, which was posted today.

This spring I'm starting to research Brad Pitt's interests in architecture and sustainable design, particularly as these interests have been integrated into the Make It Right foundation homes in the Lower Ninth Ward of New Orleans. And so here's what I propose: if we can't award Brad Pitt an Oscar, perhaps we can dedicate part of a new terminal at Louis Armstrong airport after him. Something with a nice ring to it, like the Brad Pitt Pavilion.*

*And then, if we want to follow a dark flight of fancy: at some point in the future, after humans have successfully served their time on Earth (or 'served the Earth', à la Rick Santorum), when wild alligators are crawling around the ruins of our airport as it slowly sinks into the gulf, and as the words Brad Pitt Pavilion etched in stone are obscured by competing cat's claw and morning glory vines, history will then uncannily recall those scenes in Twelve Monkeys after Pitt's ingenious madman Jeffrey Goines frees all the animals from zoos, and they re-inhabit the urban wilderness...

What is "Airport Reading"?

Dominique Browning has a fascinating piece in the New York Times today called "Learning to Love Airport Lit." The article is a persuasive (and also humorous) take on the most effective kinds of airport reading. In Browning's words, the ideal airport reading involves "plain, old-fashioned, unrelenting, compelling storytelling. You’ve got to reach for the best-seller shelves." Browning is really concerned with the utmost practical aspect of airport/airplane reading: what kind of texts are the best for killing time. Of course, there's also a variety of airplane reading about the time that kills: aircraft safety briefing cards tell us through frame-by-frame illustrations how we might survive plane crashes—including, in an embedded mise en abyme, the actual reading of the text itself (see image above).

I've been thinking about this issue incessantly over the past ten years, and my new book takes up this matter explicitly in the first chapter, which is called "What is Airport Reading?" (You can even read that chapter as the free preview sample Continuum is providing for a time.)

What's so curious to me about Browning's article is how the question of what to read in airports and on airplanes always relies on an implicit, savage indictment of the state of air travel as we have created it: it's readily and widely admitted to be "endlessly unpleasant" (in the words of Browning). Which is to say, we admit and even insist upon the awfulness of air travel, and then try to find ways to distract ourselves from its awful duration, expected drudgery, and always possible (if not probable) delays. In so doing, we impede our abilities to actually change the realities of air travel. With such a fixed determination on all the ways that air travel is wretched, it's hard to imagine it ever being any different.

My friend Mark Yakich and I have been taking a slightly different approach over at our website Airplane Reading. (There's something to be said, too, about the important differences and overlaps between airport reading and airplane reading—but I'll save that for another post.) Mark and I are collecting people's stories about air travel—stories from everyday travelers, airline & airport workers, and professional writers alike—with the aim to eventually publish a selection of these pieces in a book designed for airport bookstores. It will be a book that reflects directly and thoughtfully on the very act of flight itself. We wonder if by harnessing the storytelling urge within the experiences of air travel (as all the internal metaphors of Browning's article suggest), we might actually be able to change how people fly—hopefully for the better.

The Airports in "Somewhere"

About a year ago, the New Yorker film critic David Denby took me to task for falling into "the classic idiocy of auteurism" concerning Sofia Coppola; I had written a retort to his review of Coppola's film Somewhere. Well I just watched Somewhere for the second time, and I am even more convinced than ever that it is a brilliant film, and far more subtle and sly than Denby gives it credit for.

I take my cue—perhaps not surprisingly—from the way the culture of flight is evoked in the film. At one point, our main character Johnny Marco has to fly to Milan for a publicity junket of sorts. We get two airport scenes: one as Johnny and his daughter Cleo enter LAX, and another as Johnny & Cleo exit Malpensa airport. The flight, on the other hand, is completely elided:

They arrive at LAX,

one second elapses,

and they are in Milan, trudging through the baggage claim.

Perhaps these brief scenes would not stand out so much if they were not placed in the exact middle of the film. As it is, Coppola has set an international air travel spree at the precise center point of this narrative: the artwork balances on this almost instantaneous vehiculation across vast space and considerable time. It is a journey evoked and yet entirely undermined by two brief passages through the gritty endpoints we recognize as cavernous and bland terminal-scapes: one for DEPARTURES, and the other for ARRIVALS. Everything else is left out.

By this move Coppola shows us just what she means by the phrase "postmodern globalism"—a phrase explicitly mentioned at one point in the film, and received with a look of exasperated bewilderment by Johnny.

Postmodern globalism: it might at first sound like an ironic bit of academic jargon dropped into the film to demonstrate just how cut-off from thought Johnny Marco is. But there's actually something to take from this little utterance, and a literary lineage to trace.

Globalism isn't new, of course, and it might not even be 'modern'. For the sake of this inquiry, though, let's track one way that globalism can be seen to shift from the modern to the postmodern. Ernest Hemingway's iconic Modernist novel The Sun Also Rises famously explores the malaise of American expatriates in Paris and Spain in the mid-1920s. The main character of that novel, Jake Barnes, is wounded from an airplane accident: he was a military pilot who flew "on a joke front" of the war. For Hemingway, modern globalism involves humans who are charged to fly planes in the service of conflicts of dubious origins and ends.

Thirty years later, James Baldwin's novel Giovanni's Room chronicles another tale of wandering Americans who are in search of lost identity, again in Paris and Spain. At one point in the novel the character Hella announces that she took a commercial flight in Spain and would never do it again: she claims the plane shook like a Model-T, and it probably was a Model-T at one point before it became an airplane. Baldwin's globalism in this scene marks another stage on the way to the postmodern: the materials of history (here, a Ford automobile) have been transported, updated, and recycled into another means of travel—but these materials are still haunted by latent limitations and deficiencies. The lampooned passenger aircraft in Giovanni's Room functions as an uncertain means of flight—not as existentially dangerous as Hemingway's fighter plane, yet perhaps more disorienting for how it seems to scramble senses of time, space, and belonging (an old car and a newer airplane; Detroit and Spain; being a tourist and being a tourist trying to escape an initial point of tourism).

Now consider again the airports in Somewhere. We could have easily had scenes of Johnny and Cleo in a First Class sleeper cabin on a Boeing 777—such scenes would have fit right into the hotel psychogeography explored by the rest of the film. But by placing the flight in a cinematic lacuna, by only showing us the airport passages, Coppola effectively exposes the postmodern globalism at work in the film: this is a world where high-speed air travel is no longer a matter of consciousness—it's not even experienced. It's completely taken for granted.

If Hemingway was showing us how people repressed early airborne-inflicted trauma, and Baldwin showed us how the increasing banality of flight meshes with increasingly global (non)identity, Coppola shows us a new phase: flight driven down into the unconscious. In the land of Somewhere, air travel is everywhere and nowhere at once. Air travel is the absent presence in the film, and placed as it is at the exact center point of this story, it may very well be the key to the mystery of global postmodernism. A key, however, that the more we turn, the more it seems to throw itself away.

Another New Yorker critic, Richard Brody, praised Somewhere for how "internalized" the film is. As Brody puts it, "at the same time as the shots show a reality accessible to all, they seem wrenched from the psyches of the characters." Brody goes on to describe his experience of the film as "feeling as if I had just been cruising around in a high-powered vehicle for an hour and a half, experiencing a strangely original ride through familiar grounds, a peculiar and delightful blend of the grippingly concrete and the dreamily abstracted." Brody is most obviously alluding to the black Ferrari that Johnny Marco drives around throughout the film; but I wonder if, on another level, Brody's "high-powered vehicle" is also the thundering jetliners that contemporary life has come to internalize so well.

An ordinary plane sighting, Audubon park, New Orleans, 17 February 2012

Airport (as) Art

Airport (as) Art, Louis Armstrong International

Joe Sharkey gave my book a kind mention in his column in The New York Times today, "Handy Travel Tips From Those in the Know." Joe had asked me to contribute "an actually useful air travel tip" for this column, and what I came up with was this:

Pay attention to airport art. These days most airports feature wonderful public art installations, and so you can think of your time spent in the airport as an art walk of sorts. If you find yourself in a decaying concourse with no art in sight, don't worry: you are actually part of a giant, living art piece—this is the architectural matrix and social swirl that we recognize as airport life.

It may not seem entirely useful, but I really do mean this. It might sound easier said than done: to take time to pause and enjoy the airport (as) art. But I think that moving through airports with an eye toward abstractions of form, light & color, assembling shapes, movement, and patterns can actually change the experience of flight for the better.

In her book On Beauty, Elaine Scarry claims "at the moment we see something beautiful, we undergo a radical decentering." It may seem like a stretch to go to the airport looking for beauty, but suppose that in the midst of hustling from security checkpoint to departure gate you could actually achieve such a sensation? Of course, the problem is that such an experience can arrest you, and make forward motion suddenly difficult: you've been radically decentered, and are no longer in control of your own body. This isn't the best state, perhaps, to be traveling in. But maybe, with practice, it could inspire a different form of air travel, one more open to contingency and flux.

Contingency and flux: these are words that no traveler (or worker) in their rightful mind wants to contemplate at the airport, but maybe we just need a focal adjustment, or to be open to what Scarry calls "aesthetic fairness": a lateral regard for things that quickly becomes an ethical stance, too, because you are not as quick to disregard something's value. In On Beauty Scarry goes on to add that "radical decentering might also be called opiated adjacency." What would it mean to consider airport scenes not as purely functional (or dysfunctional) spaces, but as adjacent entities in dynamic relation to our seemingly separate movements and mindsets? What would it mean to really inhabit and look at airports as art, spilling all around?

It's in the air

A short essay about my airport work—cleaning out aircraft seat-back pockets at night—is in the current issue of Narrative magazine.

Meanwhile, over at Room 220 Nate Martin recently discussed the fantastic atmospheric photographs of JFK by Sophie Lvoff, from a haunting series called "For Don DeLillo."

(c) Sophie Lvoff

Lvoff seems to be making a point about the heaviness of the air around airports. So much empty space, so full of meaning.

Speaking of visual things, I finally saw the film Moneyball, and was completely thrilled to see an airport scene that fuses The Textual Life of Airports with my current book project on Brad Pitt:


In this scene, Pitt's baseball team general manager Billy Beane is trying to reassure his daughter Casey (played brilliantly by Kerris Dorsey) that he's not in trouble. (Beane's job is definitely on the line at this point in the film.) They are in the Oakland airport, with Casey getting ready to board a plane; she's an "unaccompanied minor," so the father is allowed to accompany her to the boarding gate. Here's the dialogue:

Billy Beane: "Do I look worried?"

Casey: "Yeah."

Billy: "...'cause you're getting on an airplane; those things crash all the time."

This is a classic example of what the journalist Dennis Lim has rightly called Brad Pitt's "wild card" quality. This is part of the mythology of Brad Pitt: his ability (often in single roles) to oscillate incredibly between cool, collected reason and erratic, emotionally charged physicality.

In Moneyball Pitt represents an adoring father, and his professional recklessness is meant to be entirely compartmentalized: Billy Beane is trying to change the game of baseball and regularly throws plastic chairs into walls at the stadium; but the bonding scenes of Pitt and Dorsey seem to suggest that he leaves his rogue attitudes at the office (except for one scene in which he makes Casey a ridiculously huge ice cream sundae—but we'll let that one slide).

Yet in the scene above, a little glimpse of Tyler Durden bursts into view. In this brief utterance, Pitt sends up commercial air travel and mocks it as a dubious project. The sterile white background of the scene—the generic concourse ambiance—underscores the sentiment here, as the exclusive privilege of flight is shown to be something rather drab and non-distinct. And Pitt's characteristic sarcasm and dark humor punctuate the scene with something else: a specter of horrible violence (the plane crash) lurking just beyond the frame, but well within the realm of possibility.

This scene in Moneyball works somewhat like the airport appearances in the Hardy Boys airport mysteries that I discuss in chapter 3 of my book: they jam together bland terminal backgrounds with looming explosions and violence. This problem also appears in a provocative sculpture by the artist Srdjan Loncar, "Abstraction I" (2003):


This piece is a three-dimensional collage—or in Loncar's words, a "distorted mosaic"—made from photographs of actual airplane disasters. It juxtaposes in a single object the mundane surfaces of flight and their distended flaring ends. It is interesting to note that though its completion date was 2003, the sculpture was conceived prior to 2001. And of course we must note that Moneyball takes place in 2002—Pitt's offhand reference to plane crashes cannot help but be loaded with the cultural baggage of that moment. It's in the air.

Pam Houston, Airplane Reader

It was in late 2003 or early 2004 when I first met Pam Houston. We were on an early morning airport run from Davis, CA to the Sacramento airport.

To get from Davis to the airport, you have to hurtle across a spindly causeway that spans the swollen lowlands of the Sacramento river valley; usually you can see night herons and cranes skimming the rice fields on both sides of the elevated highway as you race past. The Sacramento airport also lies (in)conveniently within a major bird migration pathway. Last week a United aircraft experienced a bird strike shortly after takeoff, and had to return to the airport; an engine was damaged, birds most likely died, passengers were rerouted, etc. In my book The Textual Life of Airports, I explore Sacramento's unique and vexed relationship with birds (see chapter 8).

Anyway, Pam and I were being shuttled across the causeway by the eternally gracious Janie Guhin of UC Davis. Pam and I started exchanging various airport myths and airline lore, and very quickly we realized that we shared a common obsession. I told her some of my stories from working at the airport outside of Bozeman; she shared her quirky perspective on simultaneously being a frequent flier and a ranch girl ('girl' here used with full respect and critical scare-quotes).

A few years later, over lunch, Pam told me all about the novel she was working on at the time: she described how the narrative was punctuated by little inter-chapters that would take place in flight; the main character was always flying to or away from some romantic (conceived broadly) connection. I was, of course, excited about the possibilities of such a literary work.

Now that book has just been released: it's called Contents May Have Shifted. Pam wrote a beautiful and brilliant piece for me & Mark Yakich to feature at Airplane Reading; it begins in the Denver airport, and ends in the air—or really, it's a flight that takes the reader right to her novel, like a möbius strip made of words...

I feel really fortunate to have crossed paths with Pam Houston, on the way to the airport.

Grab Bag

Today Continuum featured my book on their Literary Studies blog, and over on his site Roy Christopher wrote an engaging distillation of "terminal philosophy," which includes a discussion of my book.

Then there's this:


It may not look like anything special, but as is the way of so much airport culture, it is an amalgam of stories, myths, and attitudes—all bundled in a mundane object. It's a custom Ziploc baggy handed out at the Philadelphia airport (circa 2006) during the infamous 3-1-1 time period, after the liquid and gel scare.

Remember the scene? Silver trashcans overflowing with Right Guard, Secret, and Gillette sticks... So much aromatic confidence and plastic material discarded in a single TSA mandate. In 1894 Kate Chopin used the marvelous and seemingly innocuous phrase "grip-sack" toward the end of "The Story of an Hour." The airport Ziploc represents another chapter in this American narrative of travel disasters, botched communication, and the freedom that flees.

I think I am going to start posting here all the bits and scraps that didn't make it into my book The Textual Life of Airports. There's some really good stuff, all rife with subtleties & niceties...

the only space that matters is yours

She is lying on a First Class sleeper seat. In that luxurious seat/bed she is floating, super-humanly, above snow-capped peaks. She is grounded, but still in the sky. She is—apparently—flying Korean Air.

The seat/bed in this ad is one to be found in a wide-body jetliner. But its luxury is shown to be attached, or just barely floating above, the natural ground. As if, in a way, our passenger never left the Earth.

This advertisement sums up in spectacular form the hyperaesthetic culture of air travel seating. The seating of air travel, whether in the air or on the ground, at the airport, is commonly imagined to be a luxurious experience, where sensations are heightened. Here, in the Korean Air ad, we see that the scale is profoundly out of whack. Thus the tagline—“comfort on a whole new scale”—plays off the Lilliputian landscape that our passenger finds herself resting on/above.

This is the communicated feeling: traveling Korean Air, you are bigger, your footprint quite literally enormous. No matter that, energy-efficiency speaking, this is in fact true for the space-devouring First Class passenger; the point here is how it is imagined and projected as an earthy phantasm. Our passenger’s bottom blends beautifully into the snowy peaks below; the seat/bed appears as a natural extension of the craggy terrain.

What I want especially to highlight here is the fusion of ground and air—stillness and speed—that is condensed in the marketing and imagery of air travel seating.

On the level of the sign, we might say that the signifier here is this out-of-scale depiction of the woman in a state of repose, seemingly indifferent to or utterly agreeable with whatever is around her (and indeed it is a strange scene).

The signified, of course, would be the concentrated notions of comfort, space, ease, and physical dominance—all while radical mobility (being “expelled in jet-form,” to quote Barthes) is taking place.

The full matrix of signification here naturalizes an image of human air travel—and not any routine image of hundreds of human bodies corralled into a dented metal tube. In fact this ad, in a miraculous turn, makes the elite mode of commercial human air travel—the singular First Class chaise lounge—seem to be the most natural form of air travel: it is literally connected to the Earth, a sort of peasant offspring of mountains and trees abutting a tranquil sea.

The ad closes with a double-edged line: “the only space that matters is yours.” Here we are presented with two possible readings: 1) the naturalistic interpretation of isolation in a cold world, where rugged human individuality is the only effective recourse (for philosophy as well as for daily life); and 2) a simple pragmatic message that supports the exorbitant cost for renting a small seat/bed for nine or twelve hours as you are shuttled around the globe: in this time, the space that matters is yours (but it’s only ‘yours’ on a strictly temporary basis). Either way, the ad does its work, positing the wish image of air travel as both a simple existential reflex and a complex political economic stance.

Yet finally we must wonder: is this disembodied seating fixture the remnant of a crash, à la the opening scenes of Lost? We are not meant to pursue this connotation, clearly. With air travel, nothing must disobey the ground rule of Progress.

***

(I'm teaching Roland Barthes's Mythologies in one of my classes this semester, and my students and I are experimenting with the method & form.)

Information

"Information" (c) 2011 J. Ryan Williams

Diagram genius Ander Monson wrote a really detailed and thoughtful review of Checking In / Checking Out over at Essay Daily.

Speaking of our little book, there are only about 20 copies left. Besides the handful Mark and I sent out to reviewers and friends, we've sold almost all the other 500 copies from the initial print run. (Okay, maybe we also guerrilla dropped a few copies in various airport bookstores around the country...) But the point is that there are only a few left of the original boutique edition. The next edition of the book will likely lose the unique size and get a different cover.

Semi-relatedly, I'm trying to get a hold of Monson's first chapbook, Safety Features, as I understand that it takes place entirely in airports. I've collected so many airport odds and ends since finishing my first book that I'm starting to sense a sequel on the horizon...

Some Recent & Current Things

Tarmac watching at O'Hare

Carolyn Kellogg wrote a very nice review of Checking In / Checking Out in the LA Times Books section.

And Nicole Sheets gave the book and Airplane Reading a kind mention at Wanderlust and Lipstick.

Meanwhile, I've been experimenting with Twitter as a way to draw people to Airplane Reading, and I'm quite enjoying the formal constraints, as well as the aesthetic and philosophic possibilities nestled within the form's forced compression. I know, it's not like it's a 'new' tool or anything; but it's often intimidating to start into new media forms, and gratifying when they start to feel like you've got the hang of them. I've particularly liked playing with the photo-essay possibilities granted by Twitter, and I've been posting photos at Twitpic.

I'm also starting to rework my long essay on airport/aircraft seating, which I will be sending out to a journal for review in March. I'm starting this essay with a reading of the psychoanalysis of flight in the opening Claude Sylvanshine chapter in The Pale King. I'll be presenting some of this material at ACLA in Providence this coming spring, in a seminar on David Foster Wallace.

Me & Mark at MSY

Nate Martin of Press Street's Room 220 put together a great interview with me & Mark, about our little two-sided book Checking In / Checking Out.

Time to Reconsider Air Travel

As long as we're in the mood for making open claims on behalf of sweeping change (if also without specific demands), here's my contribution:

It was a beautiful thing to see, aircraft climbing, wheels up, wings pivoting back, the light, the streaked sky, three of four of us, not a word spoken.

—Don DeLillo, "Hammer and Sickle"

In the above sentence from his new collection of stories, Don DeLillo aptly describes the sublimity of human aviation. But this story is about prisoners, who are on work detail cleaning up the tarmac of an Air Force base. Here, as in so many scenes in DeLillo's novels, DeLillo seems to be urging us to take the time to reconsider air travel.

With the announcement earlier this month that American Airlines will file for Chapter 11 bankruptcy, it is time to reconsider air travel. On November 29 a New York Times article about the parent company of American Airlines, AMR, noted “AMR’s financial health has been eroding for years.”

Indeed, if we want to resort to metaphors of health, we are talking about an entire industry that appears to be afflicted with chronic financial problems. Based on the bankruptcy record of nearly all major airlines, it is demonstrably the case that flight is neither a sustainable nor an economically viable mode of mass human transit.

The accomplishments of flight over the twentieth-century were impressive, to say the least. The relative achievements over the first decade of the twenty-first-century have been regressive at best (e.g., multi-hour tarmac waits), and invasive at worst (e.g., full body scans).

Scott McCartney’s recent Wall Street Journal column “The Middle Seat” celebrated Singapore's Changi International Airport as “arguably the world’s most fabulous airport.” McCartney goes on to laud such features as “comfortable areas for sleeping or watching TV, premium bars, work desks and free Internet. A nap room is about $23 for three hours; a shower can be had for $6.” In short, what McCartney finds so alluring and “fabulous” about Changi are precisely the banalities of everyday life on the ground.

Why is it that we find this level of bare life so surprising (and valuable) in airports, as if we have lost touch with our showers and beds at home?

At the extreme end of this line of inquiry, a front-page New York Times headline on Saturday December 3 stated, provocatively, “Hot on the Trail of ‘Just Right’ Far-Off Planet.” Scientists, it seems, may be on the verge of discovering remote planets that lie within the “habitable zone.”

But wait: we live on one of those planets! We have airlines filing for bankruptcy on one of those planets, and airports that simulate ordinary life on one of those planets! Perhaps it is time to really reconsider all of our air travels. It may very well sound like an outlandish question, but what would it take to stop dumping resources and energy into mass air transit, and instead to reinvest in our lives on the ground, on this planet? It is a question worth taking seriously.

Book ~ Alien

I saw my book for the first time today. What a weird feeling. It resembles an object from outer space. Vaguely recognizable, yet totally alien at the same time. Actually, it's rather like picking up a stranger in the baggage claim: the ambiance is completely familiar, but there's also the thrill of the unknown...

(I should say, too, that Continuum did a beautiful job on the book-as-object; in an age of electronic reading, it's very nice to hold a finely crafted paper book.)

Reading Mark Alan Stamaty

I thoroughly enjoyed Mark Alan Stamaty's touching autobiographical narrative in the most recent cartoon issue of The New Yorker ("A Cartoon Legacy," October 31). Here are the last three frames:


Stamaty may just call himself a cartoonist, but I find his work to be rife with literary-theoretical significance. I remember as a child being mesmerized by Stamaty's book Small in the Saddle (1975), a story that I now appreciate as a revisionist history of the American West as shrewd as Annie Proulx's Wyoming stories or Cormac McCarthy's Blood Meridian.


Then there is Stamaty's Who Needs Donuts? (1973), which explores ideas of solipsism, addiction, and connection in a consumer culture with as much ambition and layered meaning as David Foster Wallace's sprawling Infinite Jest.


As one more example, Stamaty's illustration of Frank Asch's story Yellow Yellow (1971) illuminates an urban ecology with an attention to detail and texture that now seems to have been anticipating contemporary forays into object-oriented ontology.


I'm drawing on memories from 30 years or so ago, but as I recall, this story is about a boy who finds a yellow construction helmet on the ground, and he puts it on and starts to walk around; the only problem is that it is adult-size, and so it partially covers his eyes—it gives the world a weird yellow hue, strangely magnified. Yet this obfuscation and yellowing of vision ends up turning the world magical and seen to be teeming with all sort of things, and complicating the barriers between living and nonliving, human-scale and frog-scale, built and organic. The conceptual boundary lines all become wonderfully blurry, and indicative of a flattened ontological plane replete with bricks and beetles and boys, nails and nuts and newspaper clippings, frogs and Formica, tangled string and two-headed turtles:


It's not that everything is jumbled and therefore matters less, or that the human character in the story becomes insignificant; rather, it's that everything takes on more meaning under the object-oriented spell of the construction helmet. And I won't give away the ending, but it involves the safety helmet having to be returned to its rightful owner...nevertheless, the boy discovers a way to stay in the vibrant realm of objects, anyway.

All images © Mark Alan Stamaty

The Textual Life of Airports

My book The Textual Life of Airports: Reading the Culture of Flight will be available December 1.

The hardcover edition is $100—which I know might seem rather expensive. Look, it's an academic book; such pricing is fairly standard. More than that, though: it's worth it! It will change the way you experience—and tell stories about—airports. If you don't have a hundred dollars to spare, please request the book from your local or campus library. The much less expensive paperback edition will be out next year.

Book Review: A Meaning for Wife

My good friend and poet colleague Mark Yakich just published his first novel, A Meaning for Wife. Mark told me about this novel when we first met, at which point it was still forming in notes on the back of Mark's hands (sometimes both of them, well up onto his forearms). The novel begins and ends on airport taxiways, just before the two flights that bookend the story—so I had an obvious point of interest. Then I read a galley of the novel when it was picked up by the savvy independent publisher, Ig.

It seems to me as though this novel is taking up David Foster Wallace's anticipation of a new kind of U.S. fiction. In his 1993 essay "E Unibus Pluram: Television and U.S. Fiction," Wallace writes:

The next real literary "rebels" in this country might well emerge as some weird bunch of "anti-rebels," born oglers who dare somehow to back away from ironic watching, who have the childish gall actually to endorse and instantiate single-entendre values. Who treat old untrendy human troubles and emotions in U.S. life with reverence and conviction. Who eschew self-consciousness and fatigue. These anti-rebels would be outdated, of course, before they even started. Too sincere. Clearly repressed. Backward, quaint, naive, anachronistic. Maybe that'll be the point, why they'll be the next real rebels. Real rebels, as far as I can tell, risk things. Risk disapproval.

A Meaning for Wife functions in precisely these ways. What follows is a version of the review I posted on Amazon:

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When I first read A Meaning for Wife it reminded me of the stories told in the films Garden State and Grosse Pointe Blank. Like these two movies, Yakich's novel has a similar theme of existential searching within the suburban banalities of late American life. Specifically, "A Meaning for Wife" explores the psycho-geography of Algonquin, Illinois (a suburb of Chicago), under the pretense of a 20th high school reunion, itself cast in the dark shadow of the sudden death of our main character's wife.

I was recently teaching Ernest Hemingway's The Sun Also Rises in a 20th-century American fiction course when I realized that A Meaning for Wife is actually participating in a longer lineage of American narratives of disillusionment and irony—irony so deep that "depth" isn't even the right way to describe it. The irony of this kind of fiction is through and through: there is no surface of sincerity that escapes its opposite meaning, and so you can never quite be certain how to take things. The characters who are rendered pathetic are in fact the most stable; the crazy ones utter startling truths from time to time; and home is both safe and claustrophobic for our main characters.

This constant uncertainty of meaning stems from the fact that the main characters of these narratives have lost something significant (Jake Barnes's "accident"; the sudden death of one's lover in A Meaning for Wife), and everything experienced thereafter is distorted and distended, marked by this loss. And neither does the surrounding world stand out as full or fully present: the world too becomes exposed as riddled with lack—even when it is apparently charged with excess. (One might consider Walker Percy's The Moviegoer as another text in this genre, and also Lydia Davis's Varieties of Disturbance.)

The main character of A Meaning for Wife is at turns humble and arrogant, despicable and admirable, hilarious and morose, wise and absurd. His witticisms often morph into lyrical mush over the course of a paragraph, and his mature (and indeed 'experienced', in the Blakean sense) perspective is continually undermined by the sniveling, "squawking" toddler son Owen who accompanies our main character like a parodic Yoda in the backseat of the grandparents' "dull beige sedan."

A Meaning for Wife is peppered with brilliant turns of phrases on every page, like a spontaneous decision to leave the past behind and drive all the way to California, an American Western trope cut short by the realization that Owen will doubtless get hungry and therefore they'll "never make it farther than the Mississippi." Or this observation, as the reunited high school chums drink their way through giddy (if at times awkward) conversation: "Swallowing—isn't it simply another way of marking time?"

The genius of this novel is that it bumbles along on a journey that is always just on the brink of happening, right up to the final sentence—while at the same time, the narrative keeps us wondering if in fact the very concept of 'the journey' is located irrevocably and maddeningly in the past, even as we (must) hurl ourselves into a future to come.

More Faces & Figures, This Time on Autoracks

This morning I saw more faces and figures on "autoracks" as they passed—a great rat, a snowman, a mystery visage, and some sort of hooded ninja:





As I watched these faces roll by I was reminded of when I lived in Montana and saw similarly striking moving-canvases. My friend Greg Keeler and I would fish these weird parts of the Gallatin River, places where, to get to, you'd have to walk along the tracks—sometimes right between a vertical cliff on one side and the swirling river below on the other, and if a train came you had to sprint to where the cliff leveled off or the riprap became generous enough to climb down onto. It could be quite terrifying when the trains came bearing down suddenly from around a bend. Anyway, sometimes the trains would be carrying green-coated bodies of Boeing 737 airliners, like large alien phalli; other times, there would be long lines of boxcars palimpsestically spray-painted over with a thousand codes, signs, warnings, and other idioms known only to the secret painters. I'm thinking of exploring such scenes in a future course called something like "everyday aesthetics."

Faces of the Ordinary

Two faces seen on my walk this morning:

"The ordinary is a moving target. Not first something to make sense of, but a set of sensations that incite."

—Kathleen Stewart, Ordinary Affects

"But always the face shows through these forms."

—Emmanuel Levinas, "Ethics as First Philosophy"

Small Houses

Alec Wilkinson had a great article on "tiny houses" and the psychology of small home dwelling in The New Yorker last summer ("Let's Get Small," July 25). Wilkinson focuses primarily on a movement that builds and resides in homes built on trailer platforms: they can be moved around to different plots of land, and thus the homeowners can live "off the grid," in a sense.

Yet for all of Wilkinson's insights as to the motivations behind tiny house dwellers, he misses an important point: it is not just that tiny houses allow people to live "off the grid"—small homes also are a way to make less of an impact on the grid. In other words, it is not just a matter of living beyond or under the radar: it is also a way to live on the radar, using far fewer resources. While it's true that building codes now do not support such structures, Wilkinson's article illuminates a trend that might (wisely) be taken up more broadly, and thereby affect changes to the very codes that now make such choices seem untenable.

As I mentioned in my previous post, I really like small houses, and believe they offer so much potential for rethinking living space and human relationships to what we call 'property'. I glimpse such places occasionally around New Orleans, where incredibly narrow homes are nestled into alleys and situated on surprisingly tiny lots. Certainly there is a complex history to such dwelling spaces in New Orleans; but I think there might also be lessons for the future, particularly as we learn to modulate our consumption of resources and perhaps even decrease the human 'footprint' on this planet. Here is another small house that I see on my walk to campus each morning:



I don't know the story of this structure—likely it is an unofficial guest house or studio space at the back of a larger lot. But I like to imagine it as an actual home, replete with a scaled-down economy of practices and things...

Morning Walk Photo Essay

Most mornings these days, I go for a walk to the Mississippi River with my small roommate, Julien. This morning I decided to record my walk by taking some photos that show the things we encountered along the way.


Julien doesn't walk yet, so I push him in this three-wheeled device.


In the humidity of New Orleans, the electricity lines buzz and crackle overhead.


This is one of my favorite houses in the neighborhood, designed and built by Chuck, who also lives in it. I love the juxtapositions of new and old architecture in the city, the traditional Victorian flourishes alongside modern angles and minimalist design.


I also have a thing for small houses, and I keep track of the small houses in the neighborhoods around town. (I generally think of a small house as under 1000 square feet, though I know this definition is debatable. But when dealing with New Orleans typologies, 1000 square feet and under makes for a useful measuring stick.)


Someone threw out a printer—including the paper.


Something about this house feels very Lynchian, to use a term coined by David Foster Wallace.


Perhaps it's that across the street from the Lynchian house there is a nameless, brick-walled compound with a subdued screaming generator somewhere inside, and a sign on a metal door that says WARNING: 13,800 VOLTS.


Here is another small house; note the toilet on the front porch.


I'm thinking about tennis a lot these days because I'm teaching a seminar on David Foster Wallace, for whom the tennis court becomes an intense ecotone, and the human player a migratory species.


Finally we reach the river. We pass an empty Abita box. There's a guy with his fishing rods set up on the old skeleton of a barge below the rip rap. The other day we saw a dead catfish on the river bank; it was the size of a cinder block. The wild roosters aren't around today. Sometimes they are pecking at the remains of crawfish boils from the night before. It's quiet this morning—no boats go by.


Usually we see tankers and tugs pushing barges. This morning as we pass, the water is flat and empty. Upriver, boats are loading.


We cross over the railroad tracks just as a freight train approaches.


Julien points out each car as it passes.


One car carries what appears to be an important message.


Walking back down Magazine St., now. I like how this company is called "Pothole Killers": as if they conceive of potholes as vibrant things that can be killed...or, on the other hand, maintained & cultivated. It is an ordinary, found example of what the philosopher Jane Bennett calls "vital materialism."


Speaking of ecology, the sunlight looks liquid coming through the big oaks festooned with Spanish Moss in Audubon Park.


Julien likes to feel the stringy bromeliads that hang down to where he can reach them.


A mysterious new boutique is about to open on Magazine St.


Interesting headline on the front page of the USA Today.


Almost back home—but first, a quick stop at the best espresso joint in town.